No beer in a bar, much less sex in my car, but just the two of us perched on the top step outside her one-bedroom prefab townhouse with a cheese pie so succulent it rendered us speechless for minutes at a time. She had said that, lifesaver though I was, if I attempted anything wacky or even suggestively satanic, she’d go succubus on my ass—she had studied ninjutsu and Descartes and knew how one enhances the other—“so don’t get snaky,” she said—and I warmed with admiration. Here was a gal with gumption, sangfroid, with a Virginia voice that might melt wrought iron. In the driveway slept her yellow Volkswagen Beetle, the face of a whopping flower painted on the hood and testifying to goodness.

William Giraldi: Interview by Charles Homar, the narrator/memoirist of Busy Monsters

Getting you to sit down with me has been like trying to get a fabulist to spell quotidian. I’ll start by saying you’re a rat and fink, no closer to Christian doing than Luther was to a lass’s panties. Individuals should abandon you. And you’ve been dodging me, coward. Look: You stole my story and passed it off as your own. You know you’ve filched. And lied. You put your name on my adventures, my memoirs, and called it Busy Monsters because apparently you believe—I don’t know—what? You can bamboozle book-buying citizens, that cabal on its last breath? Get away with thievery? Explain your fallen self. This is malarkey most foul. I believe you owe me money.

Thank you, Charles, for the opportunity to talk. I cooked you up in the black-hole gravity of my imagination—